


Strange and Compelling, or, How To Run An Orphanage With Your Homicidal Brother Breathing Down Your Neck

by Hawkbringer



Series: Stampede of Millions Orphanage AU [1]
Category: Trigun
Genre: Bodily Fluids, Break the Cutie, Canon-Typical Violence, Compromise, Defeated by Adorableness, Inhuman healing powers, Knives generally being a huge douche, Knives is a tsundere, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Masochism, Masturbation, OOC Knives, Pre-Slash, Reverse psychology, Sadism, Serious Injuries, Sexual Harassment, Training, Twincest, Vash's style of kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-20 15:33:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19994542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawkbringer/pseuds/Hawkbringer
Summary: He's really gonna do it this time. He's going totake careof Knives. No matter who has to get hurt in the process, the man isstayingwith him this time. Meryl and Milly swear to stay by Vash's side through anything the bastard throws at them. But then Knives just HAD to go and wake up... (Anime-only canon, post-series)





	Strange and Compelling, or, How To Run An Orphanage With Your Homicidal Brother Breathing Down Your Neck

**Author's Note:**

> The first in the series, set immediately following the epilogue scenes of the anime.
> 
> Inspired by Sand and Light by Sholio, from which I grabbed the idea of Knives being redeemed and Wolfwood being alive because of Plant Magic. Also inspired by Merging by labingi, where Knives and Vash have body-horror-inducing Plant powers that allow their skin to merge and rip apart and bleed when they fuck. Written completely out of order, but posted in chrono-order here. I believe this segment was the... fifth one I wrote?

Knives had, quite frankly, planned to either be dead himself, or be scraping bits of Vash's DNA out of a crater for use in reconstituting his twin from scratch, as he himself had done after the July incident with Legato's assistance. 

Very cathartic process, he believed. Got rid of all those pesky emotional attachments to memories. Let one focus on what was really important - that is, of course, removing the unwelcome blight on the planet's surface to pave the way for the civilization of glorious beings far more advanced than the ants that had built those short-sighted spaceships - what were they good for upon landing? Cannibalizing them for parts? How foolish. Just another example of the lack of forethought in the 'instinct to survive' these lowly animals possessed. 

But he had become their captive. The only reason he was allowed to live at all was his brother's mercy. He could have murdered him. Now, to be fair, Knives was quite certain that that event would not have transpired - or the little chickenshit would have succeeded 130 years ago, that first night in the desert. 

Not entirely certain that Knives could _be_ killed, the rag-tag household consisting of two women, Vash, and the invalid, and a seemingly endless stream of semi-sentient black cats, had devised a purely social method of making Knives behave as they wanted. 

The genocidal maniac loved to shout at Vash. 

That was just about the only thing the human women learned about him in the first week he was conscious. 

So they devised a system where Vash would introduce a rule, and come in for daily tongue-lashings, but if the rule was broken, he would leave. They would all, quite simply, leave him alone. React to nothing he said, change his bandages with Vash in the room to watch to ensure there were no untoward advances (none of them needed to have worried - the idea of defiling himself with human female flesh was quite repugnant to Knives, who, himself, had not killed a man with his /own/ two hands in 20-odd years - Legato was amazing for that, and plus Knives himself had been out of action reconstituting himself) and then leave. Let the isolation drive him to apologize or beg or whatever it would do. With a being like Knives, they could think of no other way.

He tried to escape of course, when he got sick of being told to follow some utterly petty rule like no curse words when yelling at Vash or the girls, and such-like. But Vash had some sort of unholy connection to him that let him know when Knives was moving, or thinking about moving, or even closing his eyes for too long of a time when not asleep. Which he did once he realized Vash could probably see out his eyes. He actually escaped the house many times - punched through the window, kicked a hole in the wall - on one memorable occasion, he threw the bathroom sink through the wall, doing more property damage in one fell swoop than the 3 of them between them had the money to pay for. 

Meryl went back to work. Bartending brought in higher earnings per hour with the tips she could earn on top of her lousy base pay, but the hours and the harassment were horrendous. Milly was less likely to break the silence-around-Knives, anyway, because she had played such games with the youngest of her older siblings when they were little, plus her anger was very slow to boil over. It did once, and only once, in the months between his waking and Wolfwood's return. 

While Knives found it amusing, the prickly way Vash stared at him for days after and the verbal abuse he allowed the smaller female while in his company began to annoy him, and, having exhausted his options, the only recourse he had was requesting that Vash make her stop. The spiky-haired man just shrugged and said he didn't dictate their every move, so he couldn't promise anything, but he said he'd talk to them. Knives had let Vash know what he thought of _that_ plan pretty clearly and immediately, which, due to his breaking of several behavior rules while doing so, caused the humanoid in question to leave the room, but all in all, his brother smoothed it over quite well. 

Eventually, Milly had to go back to work as well and Vash was left with the exhausting task of observing Knives' every move every minute of every day, except for nights when maybe one of the two would be home. 

The needle-noggin came up with a truly unique solution to the problem of his increasing sleep deprivation - he climbed into bed next to Knives. He told the man that he would have free reign of the entire house, starting tomorrow, and the only stipulation is that he be in bed by nightfall, because Vash would be expecting him by then. 

"And we're gonna sleep like this together from now on. Cuz-eeeyaaann-I'm getting tired of having to get out of bed to hold you down. This way, I just have to roll over!" 

Knives spat something vitriolic and pointed about how this plan was not going to work and he attempted to push Vash bodily from the bed, but Vash activated his heretofore secret koala-baby mode, and wrapped his arms and legs around Knives' torso and literally would not let go. 

"I'll release you at daybreak," he promised sleepily beside Knives' ear, nuzzling into the back of his neck in a way that made Knives' skin crawl and heat with fury and impotence. He attempted to scream, of course, which just made Vash take hold of his jaw and rip one side from its hinge and swelled his mouth shut. Knives immediately shoved it back into place, but the swelling wouldn't go down completely for another few hours. 

Vash repeated, very clearly, once his brother's enraged screaming had been reduced to thin, nasal mumblings, that it was nighttime, a time for sleep, so how about they both just shush now and go to sleep? 

Well, Knives shut up, having found that words were largely ineffective at producing action with this impossible trio anyway. So he took another tack.

In a bid to disgust the man into letting go, Knives attempted all sorts of egregious things over the course of that first night, including producing as many different kinds of bodily fluids as he could without the use of his hands, and making Vash roll in all of it. Once he was dehydrated, he went with attempting to bite chunks out of Vash's one good arm. But the coward was outrageously persistent, hanging on through everything and letting go only once he could see reasonably well in the pre-dawn light. 

At that point, he screamed his disgust quite comedically and immediately ran to change clothes, going so far as to shoo Knives up out of the bed, strip off _his_ clothes, and all his bandages, throw them in with the entirety of the bedclothes, and light them on fire several hundred yarz out beyond the town. Knives watched with eyebrows high, only vaguely impressed by the humanoid's ability to endure his torture. 

As the combined bodily fluids had been rather uncomfortable for _him_ to attempt to sleep in, as well, Knives did not try that particular tactic again. He instead chose to focus on one tactic per night, and found, after a week of truly stomach-turning depravities that the one thing that caused Vash the most physical revulsion was his masturbation. 

When Knives moaned, no matter where his fingers were or what they were doing (Vash adopted early on a policy of dislocating Knives' fingers if he attempted to touch _Vash_ with them), Vash's arms would shake. He would whimper and toss his head and his thighs clenched around Knives' waist repeatedly as if he were battling a strong desire to let go. 

Now, truth be told, Vash had engineered this, finding Knives' masturbating truly the least disturbing of the things he could do with his own body to disgust Vash, and it had the added bonus of sapping the angry man's energy for a time. 

He did attempt to talk a few times after that first night, adding lurid detail to the motions of his hand, but Vash rolled him face down into the mattress and dislocated his jaw with a solid elbow drop. Knives screamed ineffectually behind his closed lips - without the use of his jaw muscles, Vash was able to keep his mouth closed with the force of a single hand - and Vash repeated, "Nighttime is a time for sleep. No talking." 

The third night in a row that Vash was forced to dislocate his jaw like this, he leaned in after doing it and kissed the empty hinge-joint above Knives' back teeth. It hurt a bit, the pressure on the already mangled joint, but what stunned Knives into silence was the purity in that single gesture. The words that followed it kept him stunned for even longer. 

"C'mon, sweetheart. Let's not fight like this. Let's just go to sleep. You must be _exhausted,_ staying up all night for _days_?" Knives gave a muffled moan of consent before he knew what his vocal chords were doing. He covered it as an irritated sound by turning his head away from Vash, despite the unpleasantness of his broken and dislocated jaw, and kept rolling his head back and forth as Vash attempted to kiss more of his cheek as if in apology for his violent actions. 

Knives refused to let him apologize and eventually rolled Vash over so the man was squashed beneath his back. Knives folded his hands behind his head, and pressed his knuckles into the piece of bone that should have been in the middle of Vash's nose. But he didn't seem to have one. Knives took one hand away and prodded at his own, realizing that neither did he. Somewhat mollified by a new tidbit of knowledge about his own, oh-so-familiar body, Knives decided not to slam his head backwards and concuss his brother that night. Instead, he rolled onto his side and slept, as the little spoon, for the first full night in over a month. 

The next day, as Vash helped set his jaw back into place, worrying over its ever-slowing healing time, Vash bit his lip and offered an ultimatum. If Knives could keep his voice to a whisper volume the entire night, he would be allowed to keep his jaw unbroken. And it wouldn't matter what he said, Vash told him, not looking him in the eye. He did warn him that the traditional insults regarding ancestry and parentage would not apply very well in their case. And gave Knives a slight smile. 

Knives just stared at his half-empty expression and let a growl come to his lips as the base of the U-shaped bone healed itself back together in an excruciating manner as both Vash and Knives held it in roughly the right shape. Eager to turn his silver tongue against his brother in such a manner - horrific things are equally disturbing whether they are whispered in one's ear or shouted across an expanse of iles - Knives acquiesced. Too quickly, and Vash narrowed his eyes, expecting pain that night. 

He got it, in the form of verbal recountings of fantasies Knives had had involving the unnecessarily violent and bloody deaths of Vash, his friends, the Gung-Ho Guns, and even so far back as the crew and Rem Saverem herself. Once he felt tears wetting down the back of his hair, Knives smiled, his work for the night done, and whispered, "Good night, my dear Vashu," and turned his head to place a kiss upon the corner of his brother's ear. 

Neither of them got much sleep that night, as Vash clung more constrictingly than normal and sobbed quietly the entire night. Even Knives was irritable when Vash released him the next morning. Vash did not speak to him the entire day. When night fell and Knives sat on the bed with a coy expression on his face, Vash surprised him by solemnly stating that there would no talking, at all, for either of them. 

He punched himself in the mouth, swelling up both his lips, to prove his dedication to the cause. It was purely cosmetic - those lips would heal down in less than half an hour - but this new, pointless masochism was a new development and Knives acquiesed with a nod, holding his arms out like a needy lover, which Vash ignored as he manhandled Knives to face the mattress, and went all baby-koala across his back. Eyes already wet, Vash nuzzled his face into the back of Knives' neck and muttered one thing in the direction of his ear before promptly punching himself in the mouth again - "You know, it would be really nice if one day we could go to sleep like this and there was no punching involved. I think that would be a -eeeyyaaaannn- a dream come true." 

Knives had to admit that he slept better that night without Vash's tears wetting the back of his neck, and definitely better when his jaw hadn't been broken.


End file.
